Who has some opinions?

[liv]

Not exactly a shitpost, but an entirely frivolous poll. While I have an influx of new readers!

Consider the expression They can't see the wood for the trees:

Poll #21323 Wood

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 89

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Do you know the expression?

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I am not familiar with the expression
7 (8.2%)

I am familiar with the expression
78 (91.8%)

The 'wood' which someone can't see represents:

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Important features
21 (24.7%)

Minor features
1 (1.2%)

Details
3 (3.5%)

The big picture
78 (91.8%)

Superficial features
2 (2.4%)

Features which require attention to notice
2 (2.4%)

When I think of the 'wood', I imagine

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The substance that the trees are made of
12 (14.6%)

The area of land where the trees are growing
70 (85.4%)

Ticky

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Tickybox
59 (85.5%)

I wish to complain about this poll
15 (21.7%)

Comments

[batrachian]

Every iteration I've heard previously used "forest", not "wood".

[melannen]

+1

That version doesn't have the ambiguity I think the poll is about, so I've always read it as "too focused on details, missed the big picture". .

(If I did hear the wood version, I might assume someone was deliberately going for the opposite, or even something like "too focused on the living community, doesn't see the commodity value".)

[batrachian]

Oh, yes, I *like* the ambiguity and certainly, no poll without it. Just wanted to highlight a possible regional...something.

[melannen]

I wonder if it's a UK vs. US thing; I know there's differences in the meanings of words like "forest" and "wood" in general across the pond. (Which is actually super-fascinating in terms of the land use history and the mythmaking around it in the two countries!)

[liv]

Aha, that explains a lot. I heard a colleague say can't see the forest for the trees today, and I thought, oh, he's a non-native speaker, he must have heard the ambiguous saying, assumed the "area of land" meaning, and misremembered the exact idiom. But if it's common in some variants of English to say "forest" that does make it much less ambiguous than I'd always believed.

[lannamichaels]

I usually hear forest for the trees, but I get caught in a "I don't know" loop in "the wood for the trees" and I'd honestly consider either reading valid depending on context?

[steorra]

Likewise. So I read it with "wood" meaning "forest" because that's what the version I know means. (And said I'm not familiar with the expression, because in that format I'm not.)

[jadislefeu]

I've also always heard it as 'the forest for the trees'!

[redbird]

I learned that as "can't see the forest for the trees," which is why it was obvious to me that "wood (= forest) = the big picture."

(This icon isn't really relevant, but it is a tree icon and I don't get many chances to use it.)

also...

[redbird]

"The woods are just trees, the trees are just wood." (from Into the Woods

[randomling]

Huh. My figurative and literal interpretations of that phrase are *entirely at odds*.

Oh wait, no, I'm just brainfogged all to hell. It's about not seeing the big picture for all the details, not the other way around...

[liv]

Treeeeee! Thank you for awesome icon and interesting language information.

[ewt]

In Canada I heard both "forest" and "wood" with "forest" significantly more; in the UK I have mostly heard "wood" but "wood" here definitely seems to mean "forest" much more strongly than it does in North America.

[steorra]

Hm, this Canadian doesn't recall hearing the saying with "wood".

[sciatrix]

US person, and I've always heard forest. Actually, if I was to use this version, I would specifically say "can't see the woods for the trees." In this context, using the singular "a wood" to me connotates a sort of poetic usage, not an everyday aphoristic "those woods right there" sort.

[ewt]

I moved a lot and have some pretty recent British ancestry. Annoyingly, I can't figure out if "wood" was a thing I heard in New Brunswick but not in the prairies, or if it was a thing I heard from my mother but not other adults.

Certainly I was aware from a young age that "wood" could mean "a place with lots of trees in it" because I knew that Winnie the Pooh lived in the Hundred Acre Wood. (I didn't know what acres were until rather later.)

[liv]

Thank you for offering your experience as someone who's lived in two countries with quite different Englishes. I don't think I'd heard "forest" at all before today, so I assumed it was a mistake.

[liv]

That's really fascinating because woods, plural, sounds poetic to me. I think of The woods are lovely, dark and deep – by an American poet, or Teddy Bears' picnic – an American song. Or idioms like we're not out of the woods yet. A wood, singular, is just that group of trees over there that isn't big enough to be referred to as a forest.

[liv]

I did set up the poll in a slightly confusing way, by asking what thing that the person can't see is represented by the wood. Sorry, I couldn't quite think of a better way to ask about the ambiguity.

[aim_of_destiny]

this esl speaker has heard both the 'wood' and the 'forest' iterations of the phrase, and would furthermore like to add that there's a cognate phrase in german:
"(man) sieht den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht", which specifically uses a word meaning tract-of-land-fulla-trees (Wald) and not the-material-trees-are-made-of (that would be Holz).

[antisoppist]

I know my interpretation of it is wrong but as a child I thought it meant that you were too focused on looking at trees to realise that they were made of wood (which is the sort of not-noticing thing that I was always being told off for doing) and extrapolated from that that you were supposed to notice that the trees were made of a useful and valuable substance and that you should be practical and cut them down and make tables or something instead of wasting your time gazing at trees. Sort of the opposite of "consider the lillies of the field".

As an adult I had an "Oh! it's a wood as in forest!" moment and realised it must be meant to be about being too focused on the details to see the bigger picture.

[melannen]

It really does seem to be a true dialect difference!

I think of "forest" as connoting, in addition to "a bunch of trees together" also something along the lines of "untamed/unmanaged wilderness" - which of course it generally isn't, even out West, it's either managed or abandoned but previously cultivated/managed, but it's part of the national myth that it is.

"The woods" actually seems less poetic, and also, like, smaller? It could just mean the same thing as "forest" but I wouldn't call, for example, the half-acre of unmanaged trees at the back of a park a "forest", but I might call it "the woods", like, "I think a bobcat lives in the woods down by the crick" or something, whereas the woods down by the crick are not nearly majestic enough to rate "forest".

"Wood" singular to mean "group of trees" is either deliberately poetic/archaic/British, or very rarely it's short for "woodlot" and is definitely heavily managed.

[forestofglory]

I would also say "forest" rather than wood.

But you'd be interested to know that in the UK forest was historically used to mean game preserve for deer rather than a piece of land with trees. Also historically wood is for burning and lumber is for building. In forest manged by copicing the copice (the bit cut back and allowed to regrow ever 5-20 years) wood was for fuel, and the taller stand trees for lumber.

[white_hart]

I don't think of the wood as the area of land the trees are on, so much as the collective entity they make up by occupying that area of land...

[steorra]

I'm from BC, so it could totally be regional within Canada.